Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Colophon
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Adaptation Process
- 2 Style and Narrative Strategy
- 3 Chronological and Genealogical Structures in the Morte Darthur, the Buch der Abenteuer and the Tavola Ritonda
- 4 Narrative Plot Development in the Morte Darthur, the Buch der Abenteuer and the Tavola Ritonda
- 5 ‘The Best Knight in the World’: Adapting Character Constellations
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Note on the Texts and Manuscripts
- Bibliography
- Index
- Arthurian Studies
Appendix: Note on the Texts and Manuscripts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Colophon
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Adaptation Process
- 2 Style and Narrative Strategy
- 3 Chronological and Genealogical Structures in the Morte Darthur, the Buch der Abenteuer and the Tavola Ritonda
- 4 Narrative Plot Development in the Morte Darthur, the Buch der Abenteuer and the Tavola Ritonda
- 5 ‘The Best Knight in the World’: Adapting Character Constellations
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Note on the Texts and Manuscripts
- Bibliography
- Index
- Arthurian Studies
Summary
Note on the Texts and Manuscripts
This section offers a brief overview of the content and codicological background of each of the five adaptations in this study in order to introduce the texts and illustrate the material context within which the structural arrangement of the overall works can be understood.
The Tavola Ritonda
The Tavola Ritonda is the oldest Arthurian adaptation in this study. It survives in eight manuscripts, suggesting that it was a fairly popular text in the late middle ages. of these manuscripts the three regarded as the most reliable are the Florentine Mediceo-Laurenziana, pluteo XLIV, nr 27 – this is the oldest version extant and has been dated to the mid-fourteenth century – the Magliabechiana in the National Central Library of Florence, Palchetto 2, nr 68, which has been dated to 1391, and a manuscript of the Communal Library of Siena, dated to 1468. There have been two editions of the text: Polidori's influential nineteenth-century edition has now been superseded by Marie-José Heijkant's edition of 1997, which is based on a wider range of manuscripts.
The main source of the work is an earlier Italian translation of the thirteenth-century French Tristan en Prose, to which relatively free renderings of redactions of a prose Queste and a prose Mort Artu, as well as additional fragments from the Palamède tradition have been added alongside some apparently original tales and linking passages to create an Arthurian collection based around Tristano, but incorporating Lancilotto.
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- Information
- Malory and his European ContemporariesAdapting Late Arthurian Romance, pp. 159 - 168Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014